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Two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead late yesterday night as they were walking just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum. The Capitol Police have identified the suspect as one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Reportedly, Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” as he executed the couple, who were engaged to be married.
I have been meaning to write a “Civil War vibe-check” top-level post. My intuition was that the danger of such a nightmare scenario was receding, having peaked twice, with the mass-shooting at the Congressional baseball team practice game, and the George Floyd Riot/January Sixth Riot forming a stockbroker’s double blow-off top before a consistent decline in risk.
Recently multiple events have made me question this. The Zizian cult killings, the suicide bombing in Palm Springs over the weekend, and now this, make me feel like something is perhaps coming. Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.
Apparently his manifesto is here: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-israel-embassy-shooter-manifesto
I suppose for context, here’s something published in Haaretz-Israel yesterday (auto translated): https://archive.md/yI4Dy
If the population of Gaza were polled on October the 8th, 2023 on the same question (with regards to a conquering Arab army entering Israel), I wonder what they would have said? I suspect that the percentage would have been higher than 47%, and indeed on the previous day, almost every Israel Jewish civilian they encountered who did not successfully flee was either killed or captured to ransom for their own prisoners.
There is wisdom to the most famous adage about revenge. I am on record here as saying that I suspect Israel’s founding in its current location, fated as it was, is the most likely cause of its eventual undoing, which is likely to be far more brutal, more horrific and more violent than the conflict since 1947 so far.
But if an Israeli says “well, the Arabs would do the same or worse to us if they had the whip hand” he speaks the truth, and he does so without persuasive counter-argument. This is what people in this part of the world do. When you move to Arabia, when you become indigenous, when you believe it…well, thats why it’s called going native.
The gap in this thinking is where Americans are obligated to support Israel as the modern, moral, side of the conflict.
If this were an African conflict I was just being introduced to by an Economist podcast today, I'd tend to say let's stay out of it, they both seem like evil groups.
If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.
I mean, if Israel gets fewer precision munitions from America, that just means they'll have to use things that have a higher error ratio/cause more collateral damage. And if the Iron Dome and other missile defense systems get depleted, they'll be forced into greater offensive action. I think Israel will still come out alright, but everyone in the region including Israel will have a worse time of it than otherwise.
Particularly since one of the obvious- immoral, but obvious- ways to mitigate the need / use for bombs in Gaza is to push the Gazans into the Sinai.
Would this be ethnic cleansing? Yes. Would it result in fewer Gazan deaths than continued war? Also yes, if you believe the claims from the last years that the war itself was genocidal in terms of casualties.
Would the Egyptians or anyone else go to war to shove the gazans back into Gaza? Almost certainly not.
Very disruptive, very destabilizing, very, very immoral and amoral both. But also far more likely than any sort of 'Americans and Europeans cutting ties to the Israelis leads to the Israel succumbing to the intifada.'
Almost certainly yes. Egypt's government and citizenry already detest the appearance of being pushed around. There isn't really a better casus belli then preventing having your countries territorial integrity flagrantly violated by an external state, and also preventing an ethnic cleansing.
Palestinians have proven themselves as a destabilizing population (just see Palestinian behavior in Jordan, Kuwait and Lebanon). Egypt is already over-populated and financially drowning trying to ensure an adequate quality of life for its citizens. If Palestinians are moved into the Sinai, the cost-benefit analysis would skew heavily towards open warfare, since such a population displacement would literally cause a life or death crisis in Egypt itself. At that point, its either war or state collapse.
The cost case and not wanting responsibility of the Palestinians is a strong reason against war. War against Israel ruins the Camp David accord security assistance/entitlement from the US, all-but-certainly disrupts the Suez Canal revenue stream, and various other issues. These cost issues occur win or lose, and even in victory the Egyptians would need to either completely overthrow the state of Israel to provide a place for the gazans- thus risking the nuclear issue- or establish some sort of Egyptian civil control of 'just' Gaza, which renders the war premise of war moot.
Rather than a war against Israel, the far cheaper option is to push the Palestinians on to other areas. Whether it's further west to Libya, to Europe, to other muslim states, or otherwise. Egypt has more options for not-absorbing the Palestinians other than war with Israel.
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What does "push" mean here, concretely? Generally, in cases of ethnic cleansing, it means "threaten people with lethal violence unless they move", which is why the term is often just taken to be mostly equivalent to genocide. If the Gazans say "hell no, we won't go", what happens to them?
They continue to be crossfire. But people who don't have such strong views are encouraged/facilitated to leave.
The policy of everyone in the region- regardless of of nominal sympathies- may have been for the Gazans to be stuck in Gaza rather than let into their own country, but that hasn't really a demonstrated desire by the Gazans when border restrictions to Egypt get relaxed. Where the Gazans can buy their way out, non-trivial fractions of the population have, with around 5% of the estimated gazan population- 100,000 of about 2 million- doing so in the war so far. And that has been against Egyptian efforts.
Historically- and in previous iterations earlier in the war- the Gazans saying 'hell no, we won't go, we'd rather fight to the death' are also the ones shooting the gazans who would rather leave. And the Egyptians up-to-literally push back Palestinians caught breaking into the Sinai, occasionally even handing them back to Israelis if the Israelis seize the border checkpoints to mitigate overland smuggling. Israel normally accepts this because of geopolitical preferences that were dominant before October 7.
In the grimmer alternative (for everyone but the Palestinians who don't want to be there), the Israelis shoot the 'hell no' Gazans keeping the would-be refugees in, but don't accept Egyptian push-backs, and then variously open the border crossing gates / ferry willing departees to the gates / even facilitate ways around the gates if the Egyptians are particularly adamant. Short of shooting the Israelis, there's not much the Egyptians can do if the literal gates are closed behind the refugees, and the nature of that firefight is that it probably ends with the Egyptians pushed back to a point where they can no longer push back Gazans who walk through.
This is also partly why Egypt has been categorically denying reports of any consideration of 'temporary' relocation of Gazans into the Sinai as of earlier this year. One of the numbers mooted- half a million- would be about a quarter (25%) of the estimated gazan strip population. If 25% were able to leave- not even 'willing,' but 'able'- then it is very, very hard to prevent the next X% from doing so if they want to.
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I don't think this is actually the case. If America wasn't involved and Israel didn't care about appeasing western sensibilities at all they'd just behave like the other powers in the region and genocide their troublesome minorities.
I hope we never find out, but I suspect that taking off the gloves will prove less salutary in modern warfare than many suspect.
Why do you think it would go worse than expected for a casualty-insensitive modern military facing an enemy it totally outclasses and a hostage population?
Cause, in the recent cases of Western militaries tangling with such groups that come to mind, those foes have things (friendly geography, the ability to cross into a nuclear-armed Pakistan of dubious reliability) that Gazans simply don't.
I don't think it's a win-now button that Israel has refused to press to this point.
Sure. But that could be because it leads to a total loss on the political front in both the West and with its neighbors which might vastly outweigh any benefit to being more effective at killing Hamas.
I took the claim to be that it'd be militarily less effective than people tend to imagine.
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It’s not a win now button because they want good relations with the Sunni Arabs, particularly the Gulf Arabs, and there’s only so far you can push them before the domestic situation kills any chance of full rapprochement for another 30 years. The current conflict probably delayed it five years already, which was of course Hamas’ intention.
That good commercial relations with the Arabs would be good for Israel, though, doesn’t mean the whole state would be doomed if things went biblical though, at least not immediately.
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I would think it would prove more salutary, they have air, sea and ground superiority and countermeasures against massed barely armed troops not present in the past. Of course a smaller version of the Palestinian strategy of being killed so hard and publicly that western people stop out of pity may work on Israel itself but I just can't see how Israel loses this one. Of course once that's on the table a lot of other actors might change their tune.
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That depends what ‘stay out of it’ means. If it’s just ending military aid (but still allowing weapons sales, the same way the US does to many neutral nations, and preserving the trade relationship) then no, Israel is not doomed. It would likely force a settlement with the Arabs much sooner for economic and political reasons, but it is not the threat of US intervention that prevents Israel from being invaded.
Sanctions and a prohibition on weapons sales could doom it, but that isn’t non-intervention (it is very much intervention of the standard State Department kind). Even in that event Israel is probably still safer than it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it had less of a technological advantage, less of a population advantage, less of an IQ advantage (it was much more Mizrachi before massive high IQ Russian Ashkenazi immigration) and when the Arab world was much more united against it.
Israel’s main problems are that Ben Gvir and a number of other intellectually unimpressive mizrachim have actually managed to seize a degree of political power (something the country’s ashkenazi founders fought a long, valiant, losing battle to prevent happening) and - even more importantly - that the ultra orthodox situation now threatens to spiral fully out of control as their population continues to expand.
That whole worldview (America as moral crusader) is dying anyway. Growing anti-Israel sentiment is the consequence of rising antisemitism among whites and blacks (whose growth predates October 7 and has little to do with Israel), large scale immigration from the third world, particularly from Muslim countries in Europe and on the left third-worldist sentiment that always sides with the browner, weaker party.
What sort of settlement are you thinking of? It's hard to imagine Israel giving up much control over the West Bank, much less a full 2SS at this point.
Might there be a silver lining to this? The ultra orthodox are mostly Ashkenazi, as I understand it, so their growing population might produce a high IQ demographic reservoir of sorts to offset other dysgenic trends I've heard the country is experiencing. This of course assumes there comes to exist a mechanism by which they start to participate more in secular Israeli society.
Depends on how bad the economic crisis is. People forget that Israel was very poor by Western standards until the 1980s and became a rich country relatively recently, with huge growth in living standards over the last 25 years (kind of like Ireland, but without the very harsh years the Irish had after the financial crisis). If things get a lot worse quickly I think there’s potential for significant political disruption.
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You'd think so. But, on the one hand, Trump criticizes regime change and social engineering and moralism in foreign policy and then litigates DR fascinations like South Africa and white genocide.
Perhaps we're just in the age where Americans don't even pretend that moral crusades are anything but domestic culture wars by proxy.
The South Africa thing isn’t moralist, it’s catering to white racial activists in America who have wanted this for years and who people like the VP follow on Twitter. That’s not a criticism, by the way, and I have no issues with Afrikaner migrants, who are unlikely to have any deleterious impact on America’s social fabric. But it’s not a universal human rights thing, any more than Israel encouraging Jewish immigration is a universalist human rights thing; it’s particular, it’s in-group loyalty, it’s importing more people assumed (regardless of their actual politics) to be in the core white anti-woke ethnos around which the GOP is increasingly built.
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I'm sure a lot of people would have said the same thing about Nazi Germany as about Jericho. This mostly tells you how bad Nazi Germany is, not the Jews.
Polling from the WWII era disagrees —
https://x.com/gen0m1cs/status/1913800277792039250
Only 25% of active soldiers “really hated” Nazis. 31% felt no personal hatred and 38% thought they were “pretty much like we are”. Among those 25% who “really hated Nazis”, perhaps some amount of them would want to genocide every German, but I doubt it’s more than a few %. And only 29% thought that America shouldn’t supply aid to Germans. Those polled were active soldiers, not the general population like in the Israel polling. So not even an America soldier who literally fought against the Nazis feels the way an Israeli civilian feels about Gazans.
So a quarter of American soldiers - who had suffered zero effects back home, other than a bit of minor rationing - still "really hated" Nazis. And that wouod be, to my understanding, before really being too aware of the Holocaust. Imagine if the Nazis had committed the same atrocities to Americans on American soil as Hamas did on 10/7.
They had Pearl Harbor, but Americans didn’t hate the Japanese much either, from 1940s Gallop polls you can find online. Of course they did use nuclear weapons at the end, which would be a fair comparison.
Or we can just look at 9/11? America didn’t bomb every Iraqi dwelling until every member of the Taliban surrendered. That would be sociopathic. And this caused more casualties than in Israel.
Leaving aside the conflation of Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s a ridiculous comparison, because neither Iraq nor Japan nor Germany were entirely or mostly or even substantially urban.
In reality, footage of postwar Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo looks pretty similar to footage of urban Gaza today. 5% of Germany’s civilian population died in the war by most estimates, more in many major cities. Again the numbers in Gaza are similar (WW2 was longer, but the pitched phase of urban fighting that saw most of those casualties was actually much shorter). Iraq saw far fewer civilian casualties because the Baathist government was deeply unpopular, its military was a traditional uniformed military built on the failed Arab military model of the 1970s and the majority Shia population eagerly dismantled what remained of Hussein’s regime. Go back to America’s last genuinely major conflict in Vietnam (again, predominantly rural at the time of fighting which inherently means a much lower civilian casualty rate) and the civilian casualties spike accordingly, because the enemy had morale.
That is, by the way, what it takes to root out a highly entrenched urban guerilla force that doesn’t wear uniforms, has an extensive tunnel network and embraces hiding among the civilian population. The only alternative Israel’s detractors can offer to the way the war has already been prosecuted amounts to ‘just leave and negotiate from a distance’. That is a valid approach, and a fair argument (and one I agree with), but it is not and can never be a military strategy, only a diplomatic one. Militarily, strategists offer no alternative. If you were in charge of the IDF and were given the order to militarily destroy Hamas with the soldiers Israel has and the equipment it has, you could likely come up with no military strategy that had fewer civilian casualties than the current approach.
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